Note: David Frum's new e-Book is 32 pages. After you read it, please listen to our archived recording of The Middle Ground with David as our guest for a full hour.

Click here for review by Michael Charney

Book review by Eric Byler

Former Bush speech-writer David Frum joined us on Coffee Party Radio on Dec. 4 to talk about his new e-book Why Romney Lost: And What the GOP Can Do About It. The book lays out a compelling argument for why the Republican party’s current approach cannot be sustained, as just about everyone is staying saying in the wake of the 2012 election. But here are two reasons why Frum's approach is the most likely to resonate:

1) David Frum's writing never indulges in gloating or derision. There is no "I told you so" in his tone, even though he has been issuing warnings for years, and, even though many who ignored him treated him viciously in the process.

2) David Frum's compassionate analysis of consumers of Republican media products shows a deep understanding, more respectful and more charitable than that of those who exploited them for personal and political gain.

Tea Party conservatives, Frum reminds us, suffered through the Great Recession too. They saw their home values plummet, their savings shrink, and their children’s futures imperiled just as mainstream America did. Voting for a presidential candidate and seeing a different one win is NOT an attack on one's freedom, nor does it merit a desire to leave the country or secede from the Union. And, Frum shows that most of the other notions that fueled the Tea Party movement were false as well. But, he writes, as if speaking to them directly:

...You will still feel a terrible sense of frustration. And you may feel an even more terrible sense of wrongness if, in the interval, other people with other backgrounds seem to be gaining advantages that you have lost. The words ‘I want my country back’ will acquire poignant, personal meaning.

Starting in early 2009, Republican media products offered its consumers the opportunity to cope with their anxiety, and, ease the guilt they felt for having supported the policies and politicians who brought on the Great Recession. How? By blaming Barack Obama. Frum lists the systematic misinformation campaigns that made that possible, marveling, for instance, at how consumers of Republican media products had been made to believe that taxes had gone up since 2009, and that massive job losses and TARP had begun under Obama rather than Bush. 

Frum argues, as other Republicans have of late, that fact-free political advertising, even when disguised as news or entertainment and even when supported by unlimited money, is not enough to win elections because the demographic groups who consume these media products are shrinking. "Nostalgia for a misremembered past is no basis for governing a diverse and advancing nation," he writes.  And, pointing to the fact that most Americans under 20 are people of color, he writes:

It is certainly possible for Republicans to choose to be a white person's party. If we do so choose, however, we are also choosing to be an old person's party. Since the elderly receive by far the largest portion of government's benefits, an older person's party will be drawn by almost inescapable necessity to become a big government party. ...The only way to reconcile the voting base and the party's ideology was to adopt Paul Ryan's budget plan, which loaded virtually all the burden of fiscal adjustment onto the young and the poor. And that of course intensified the party's dependence on the old, white voters who set the cycle in motion in the first place.

Frum offers this advice to those who are brave enough to stay in the Republican party and fight for its soul:

We must emancipate ourselves from prior mistakes and adapt to contemporary realities. To be a patriot is to love your country as it is. Those who seem to despise half of America will never be trusted to govern any of it. Those who cherish only the country’s past will not be entrusted with its future.

I hope that we'll discuss the "fiscal cliff" tonight as well. On economic policy, Frum observes that, too often, Republicans appear to be wrapping themselves in the guise of free-enterprise principles while protecting the selfish economic interests of their political donors. What happens when the economic interests of those who made fortunes in the 20th century — and today have the financial muscle to push political parties and even presidential candidates around — are no longer aligned with the best interest of the nation as a whole? Can the Republican party avoid having to make a choice between the economic interests of their donors and those of their constituents? Perhaps not if they take Frum's advice. But if they do take that advice, we will have a stronger, more viable Republican party, and, more importantly, a stronger, more viable country with real choices for voters, and, with an economic approach that will allow us to compete in the modern, global economy.

Purchase and download Mr. Frum’s book, Why Romney Lost, here.

Read Eric Byler's previous blog about David Frum from Nov. 2011.

by Eric Byler

Sometimes we forget that old people were not always old people. We see them as living on the other side of a wall, rather than of as part of continuum of which we are all participants at different stages.

When I first met Wendy's father-in-law at Thanksgiving 1994, he seemed like an old person to me, and, because he doesn't speak very much English and I don't speak any Japanese, I didn't think much more about of him for the next 18 years. Wendy, my mother's cousin, is a Chinese American woman married a Japanese American man named Ken Hayakawa. This past Thanksgiving, after dinner, we were putting Harry Potter on for the kids when Wendy handed me a new book: Nisei Soldiers Break Their Silence by Linda Tamura. It was opened to chapter 8. "Read this, it's about Ji-Chan (grandpa)," she said.

Kenjiro Hayakawa was born in Hood River, Oregon in 1919, then educated in Japan. At the end of his studies, he returned to America to avoid being drafted into the Japanese Imperial Army which was invading and occupying neighboring countries in Asia. He was then drafted by the United States Army and reported for duty in November 1941. Better to fight for America than for Japan, he had thought.

By the time I got to the page 113, which featured a photograph of Ji-Chan at Camp Robinson, Arkansas in 1942, I was sitting at the dinner table almost next to him. I looked at him and pointed to the picture. His unassuming but effulgent smile, which I returned, was the most significant communication we had ever had up to that point. I went on reading.

Next to Kenjiro sat Yoshiko, known to me as Ba-Chan and as Grandma Hayakawa. Yoshiko is fluent in English so I've gotten to know her quite well over the years. Along with 120 thousand other American citizens, she was ripped from her home as a result of Executive Order 9066, issued by President Franklin Roosevelt on February 19, 1942. She was 13. Yoshiko and her family were held captive at Santa Anita Park, a thoroughbred racetrack near Los Angeles, where 17,000 people were held, many of them in horse stables. "We were not in horse stable, but near them" and "There was a street named Seabiscuit," she told me quietly. Yoshiko and her family where then loaded on to trains and shipped to Rohwer War Relocation Center in Desha County, Arkansas. "They were very old rail cars that had not been in service for a long time," she told me.  "And, they didn't bother to dust them off."

As it happened, Rohwer was near Camp Robinson, where Kenjiro was stationed. On their days off, the Japanese American soldiers would cram themselves into motor cars to go and visit the internment camp. They wanted to be with other Japanese Americans, "and mostly to eat Japanese food." Yoshiko added. It was during these visits that Grandma and Grandpa Hayakawa fell in love. 

But I didn't just learn about the camps. I also learned about how our soldiers were treated in the WWII era. I'm speaking of Japanese American soldiers, but let me make this plain: they were OUR soldiers. And, whatever reverence and whatever regard we afford to members of our military today, we should afford the same to all members of our military. They are ALL our soldiers.

While their families were in prison on account of their heritage, Japanese American soldiers were subjected to a pattern of demeaning and disrespectful treatment crystallized in Nisei Soldiers Break Their Silence by an April 1943 incident at Ft. Riley in Kansas. During a visit by President Roosevelt, 120 soldiers of Japanese heritage were marched into an aircraft hanger and held at gunpoint for nearly four hours until the president had departed. Many of these same soldiers were then involved in March 1944 incident at Ft. McClellan, also in Arkansas, where about 100 men congregated outside battalion headquarters to protest their treatment. 

Kenjiro was among them, and he was also among the 21 who persisted in their struggle even though the threatened response was court martial. I won't go into detail about Kenjiro's court martial, a compelling story of civic and personal courage, followed by imprisonment (during which, Yoshiko said, she wrote him letters from the internment camp). Forty years later, 11 of these heroes, including Kenjiro, had their dishonorable discharges reversed (the other 10 had declined to participate in the appeal process).

Learning of all this, I was reminded of Capt. Bruce Yamashita who fought for equality in the 1980's and 90's, and Lt. Dan Choi in recent years. I was reminded of my grandfather's brother, Tommy Amer, who, after serving in WWII, was instrumental in ending segregation in California when he and an another Asian American veteran challenged a neighborhood covenant banning the sale of homes to non-whites, leading to a landmark decision in the California Supreme Court. And, of course I was reminded of the fact that Kenjiro's son, Ken, fought in the first Gulf War and his grandson, Colin, fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, continuing the family's tradition of service to our country.

As my sister snapped the photos you see here, it occurred to me that this family, like many Japanese American families today, would not have to come to be if not for an historic injustice. And, I thought about how I might never have known about Kenjiro's heroism if not for a book providing me the opportunity to ask about it.

Political strategists in recent weeks have marveled at the fact that minority communities tend to shun candidates and political parties that seek to rob minorities of equal protection under the law. Perhaps they assume we don't know our history. And, perhaps we don't know it as well as we should. But the experts overlook an important truth that really sunk in for me this Thanksgiving day: Our families are products of American history, and, whether or not we know all the details, we know intuitively that continuing the fight against institutionalized racism is our duty to our parents and our grandparents.

We will be more effective in modern day struggles if we better understand the triumphs, defeats, compromises, and ever-present echoes of days gone by. These lessons are waiting to be learned from members of our family and our community — if we remember to ask them in time.

by Michael Charney

Coffee Party USA is a grassroots, non-partisan movement aimed at restoring the democratic process. Our path includes:

• Identifying and advocating for legislative fixes to reform campaign finance laws, Wall Street regulations, and the tax code
• Promoting cultural changes to address political disengagement, polarization and widespread misinformation

Probably nothing has done greater harm to our political process than the Citizens United decision, which allowed unlimited funds to funnel through Super PACs and into your living room – and gave us Mitt Romney’s famous quote: “Corporations are people, my friend!”

Well, these Super PACs are many things, but they are NOT your friend. There’s no accountability, no transparency and, ultimately, very little in the way of truth that comes from these organizations.

Click HERE link to download the file to print.

As an Active Citizen, you can now participate in the protest against these Super PACs.
All you need to do is:

• print out the “invoice” (download here),
• complete the From field,
• pop it into an envelope,
• address it to our target Super PAC, Karl Rove’s infamous Crossroads GPS,
• stick a stamp on it,
• and put it in the mail.

OUR GOAL: 50,000 LETTERS, ALL ARRIVING BY THANKSGIVING!

It’s our way of making sure that Crossroads GPS knows that we are NOT grateful for their efforts…

PRINT OUT AND SEND YOUR “INVOICE” TODAY!
AND THANKS FOR YOUR SUPPORT!

Dear Crossroads GPS:

Throughout this year’s election season, your organization has repeatedly relied upon the American Voter to respond to your messages and your surveys, and to provide you with our time, attention, and opinions.

Given that the purpose of these services was to assist you in selling a specific message to other voters, we now believe it appropriate that we “Invoice the Super PAC” for the time and expertise we have provided. To that end, the following is a request for a contribution in the amount of $538.00, $1.00 for each of the Electoral College votes you have been trying to buy with your campaign.

While we recognize you are in no way obligated to pay us back for our time and efforts, we would appreciate your consideration, and look forward to your voluntary contribution.

Please tear off stub and return with any remittance you deem appropriate to the name and address above.
This is not an invoice. All payments are completely voluntary.